Animal Liberation Needs Animal Voices
The new book “When Animals Speak” argues that animals already speak, act, and resist politically — and we need to listen
To avoid being ambushed by a waiting predator, prairie dogs have developed a complicated system of “warning calls.” They “describe humans in detail, including the color of their T-shirts and hair, the speed at which they are approaching, and objects they might be carrying,” writes Dutch philosopher Eva Meijer in her new book When Animals Speak: Toward An Interspecies Democracy. They distinguish between predators coming from the sky and land, and the meanings of these calls depend on the order of the sounds. They also have a “jump-yip,” not well understood by humans: “a kind of wave that involves throwing their hands up in the air and jumping backward while yelling ‘yip,’ which is thought to probably be an expression of joy and enthusiasm; they do this when predators such as snakes leave their territory.”
Lots of animals depend on alarm calls to survive, and while these were once assumed to be knee-jerk responses to danger, Meijer writes, they’ve often been found to be highly complex and…
